Benjamin Fenster

Software Developer

One Help

One Help is a help desk "ticket tracking" system. Clients who need
help create tickets here by sending e-mail or submitting an online
form. The Help Center then routes the ticket to the relevant groups
and inviduals.

Context

The key design consideration in every aspect of One Help is: "Don't
ask what we know." Because most of our support is for University
affiliates, we know a lot about our clients already. When someone
reports a problem with "their website" we can probably figure out what
site that is without having to ask.

We see this most prominently in the "Client Profile". Instead of
trying to record details about each person within One Help, we just
connect to the applications we support and read the original data from
there. Here's a list of Blackboard 8 courses this client (namely me) can access:

Now vague reports like, "I can't add students to my course" are
easy to put into context.

One Help also collects
contextual information as tickets come in. What browser is the visitor
using? What page were they viewing immediately before clicking "Help"?

Developers will recognize immediately that much of this context is
information that's readily available to web applications. Capturing
the HTTP "Referer" property isn't rocket science. Combining it with
several hundred other bits of data to form a complete profile for a
client is the magic behind One Help.

History

I developed the first version of One Help on my own initiative and
in my own time, aiming to replace its aging predecessors.

I developed the first version to be used in production entirely on
my own time. Boston University sponsored further development, in
particular adding features to afford compatibility with the
"Information Technology Infrastructure Library," which the University
had recently adopted.